Word of the Day

: March 10, 2018

lexicographer

noun lek-suh-KAH-gruh-fer

What It Means

: an author or editor of a dictionary

lexicographer in Context

Noah Webster believed that a lexicographer's work was to document a language as it is used, without any judgment or subjective influence.

"Google celebrated the life of Samuel Johnson on Monday with an animated Doodle defining the word 'lexicographer.' Monday would have marked Johnson's 308th birthday. He was well known as a lexicographer himself, as well as a poet, essayist, critic and biographer." — Katie Collins, CNET.com, 18 Sept. 2017

Did You Know?

Today, we're looking at a word that is dear to our hearts: lexicographer. The ancient Greeks were some of the earliest makers of dictionaries; they used them mainly to catalog obsolete terms from their rich literary past. To create a word for writers of dictionaries, the Greeks sensibly attached the suffix -graphos, meaning "writer," to lexikon, meaning "dictionary," to form lexikographos, the direct ancestor of the English word lexicographer. Lexikon, which itself descends from Greek lexis (meaning "word" or "speech"), also gave us lexicon, which can mean either "dictionary" or "the vocabulary of a language, speaker, or subject."